Something Is Getting In The Way

There’s an equation I keep coming back to.

It’s simple.

Almost too simple.

But once you understand it, you can’t unsee it.

Performance = Potential – Interference

That’s it.

Two levers.

Everything else is noise.

Where it came from

In 1974, a tennis coach named Tim Gallwey wrote a book that was supposed to be about tennis.

But what he actually did was crack the underlying equation behind every performance in every sport ever played.

His idea was this.

Your performance on any given day isn’t just about how fit you are, how many kilometres you’ve done, or what your power numbers look like.

It’s about how much of your actual capability makes it to the start line and how much gets blocked before it ever gets there.

Two Levers

Lever One is what most coaches focus on.

Build fitness. Develop skills. Improve strength. Increase training load.

These things matter enormously. A solid aerobic base and consistent, quality training are the foundations for the future. You can’t skip them.

But Lever Two is where most athletes are actually losing time.

Minimise Interference

The fear that arrives the night before a race.

The doubt that creeps in halfway up a climb.

The distraction of what everyone else in the warm-up area is doing.

The voice that says you’re not ready.

This is where a huge amount of performance disappears — not on the trail, but before you even get there.

The Rider Getting 60% isn’t a 60% Rider

Here’s the thing that changes how you see this.

If you ride a race and perform well below your training level, the instinct is usually to think there’s a fitness problem.

More intervals. More kilometres. More everything.

But sometimes that’s exactly the wrong response.

Because a rider performing at 60% of their ability on race day isn’t a 60% rider.

They’re a 100% rider with 40% interference running in the background.

The gap isn’t always a fitness gap.

Sometimes it’s a noise gap.

What does interference actually look like in XCO?

It looks like catastrophising a technical section you haven’t even ridden yet.

It looks like adjusting your whole warm-up because of what someone else is doing on theirs.

It looks like carrying one mistake through every section that follows it.

It looks like needing the result so badly that you stop being able to ride freely.

It looks like losing focus after a bad start and spending the rest of the race trying to force something back under control.

None of these are fitness problems.

No training block fixes them.

So what do you actually do about it?

This is where it gets practical.

Interference doesn’t disappear on its own. But it can be reduced. And like any skill in XCO, it improves with deliberate practice.

1. Notice what your interference actually is

Most riders have a pattern. It might be the night before a race. It might be the start area. It might be when another rider comes past. Get curious about where your noise tends to arrive — because you can’t reduce something you haven’t noticed yet.

2. Set a process goal, not an outcome goal

Before your next race, instead of anchoring on an outcome goal — where you want to finish or what result you’re chasing — set one simple process goal to focus on while you’re riding. Your breathing on the climbs. Staying smooth through the technical sections. Resetting after mistakes quickly. One thing. That’s it. When interference arrives, you have somewhere specific to return to.

3. Build a consistent pre-race routine

Confidence doesn’t come from hype. It comes from familiarity. When your warm-up, your nutrition, your equipment preparation and your mindset routine are repeatable, you arrive at the start line knowing you’ve done your job. That alone reduces a significant amount of unnecessary noise. I wrote a recent article about. Check it out here!

4. Practise refocusing in training

The next time you’re deep in an interval and your brain starts telling you to back off, that’s a training opportunity that has nothing to do with fitness. Notice the thought. Return to your process. Keep going. Refocusing under pressure is a skill — and like cornering or pacing, it gets better the more deliberately you practise it.

5. Ask a better question after hard races

Instead of immediately looking for what you need to add, spend five minutes asking what was getting in the way. A difficult race isn’t always evidence of a fitness problem. Sometimes it’s evidence of interference and knowing which one it is changes everything about how you respond.

The Bottom Line

You probably have more potential than you’re currently accessing.

Not because you haven’t trained hard enough.

Because something is getting in the way of what you’ve already built.

The work isn’t always more.

Sometimes it’s learning to reduce the noise so that everything you’ve already put in can actually show up when it counts.

Both levers.

That’s the whole game.